The Double-Slit Experiment
by Nogard
Summary: Tired of Amy's overt attempts at seducing him, Sheldon pursues a Relationship Agreement loophole that says Amy can have relations with Penny. Now, Sheldon is forced to take up the burden of curing Penny of her inconvenient heterosexual behavior. He co-opts a real experiment, so if the title offends, it's your own dirty mind's fault. Amy/Penny femslash, dubcon due to skeevy behavior


Sheldon couldn't sleep. No matter how hard he tried to relax, no matter how many times he counted Doctors, companions, and associated characters (no way was Mickey a companion!), sleep could not overtake his active brain. His brilliant mind refused to be quieted until he addressed the problem at hand and found a solution to his troubles. Sometimes, it was quite burdensome to be as smart as him.

Sighing, he slipped out of bed, padded into the kitchen and fixed himself a nice cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot). Taking a sip, he shook his head. What was he going to do with Amy?

While he liked the general premise of keeping a girlfriend-keeping a woman at his side to constantly worship his genius and do his bidding like one of those blobby yellow minions from _Despicable Me_-the implied amorous activity between boyfriend and girlfriend in the romantic relationship social contract defined by mainstream American culture made keeping Amy into a Dyson-sphere-sized headache for him. The silly girl was overcome with sexuality-inducing estrogen, and her weak-willed female brain had forsaken the cool-headed rational realm of intellect for the flippity-floppity backwards land of physical attraction. Nothing Sheldon did seemed to curb her behavior. Simply ordering her not to try to seduce him was ineffective. Though technically in violation of the Relationship Agreement, he wasn't about to end it, lest Amy wind up holding hands with some nerf herder like Stewart, and she knew that. Assigning special responsibilities as punishment, like polishing his _Star Trek_ starship models, made her grimace but were ultimately ineffective at stopping fancy-pants sexual innuendos and nude visits. Even spanking her hiny until his hand hurt for days afterward seemed to have no effect whatsoever, and she requested that punishment so often that Sheldon was almost starting to think that she derived some kind of bizarre enjoyment out of the experience!

He wondered if there were something in the Relationship Agreement he overlooked. Taking his tea over to his desk, he removed the thirty-one page contract and began to carefully read. His cup was almost empty by the time he saw it: a tiny amendment to the exclusivity clause. _If it is acknowledged that THE GIRLFRIEND remain bound to THE BOYFRIEND in all aspects of the relationship, THE GIRLFRIEND may be allowed romantic liaisons with the alternate party Penny (here and after known as PENNY) without violating exclusivity._

It was a bazinga. At least, Sheldon had always thought of it as one.

The amendment came about after a silly discussion the two of them had about Sexual Orientation Change Efforts. Sheldon was working from the obvious premise that SOCE were all completely ineffective, as was the scientific consensus. The American Psychological Association published a 2009 report denouncing them as conservative religious hokum. Amy, however, adopted a hippie-dippie hokum stance that SOCE were only flawed in that they came from the religious and conservative standpoint that homosexuality was a sinful or diseased behavior to be treated, asserting that general sexual attraction and behavior could be changed through recognition of the "fluidity" of sexual orientation, citing reports of bisexual behavior published by the Kinsey Institute. Amy then proposed a psychological study in which she would apply social pressures to induce homosexual behavior in an ostensibly exclusively heterosexual woman, Penny. Sheldon had laughed soundly at the girl's feeble attempts at social "science." Amy might well be a bisexual woman herself, but Sheldon had seen far too many under-dressed men looking like the sort who used to beat him up in school to think that Penny would ever alter her sexual behavior so dramatically as to willingly engage in coitus with women on a regular basis, and he knew she would never even do what Amy really wanted: engage in coitus with his girlfriend. Amy was just a silly girl with a silly crush on a woman who would never see her as more than a platonic social partner. It amused him, so he accepted her proposal, made an amendment to the Relationship Agreement, and watched her repeatedly try and fail to secure Penny as a mate.

Eventually, Amy reached the same conclusion as Sheldon. She dismissed the hippie-dippie SOCE hypothesis as hokum, abandoned her attempts to seduce Penny, and focused her attention on Sheldon. Now, _Sheldon_ was the one who had to deal with Amy's crude attempts at behavior-modification, pressures to engage in coitus, and idiotic spam posing as friendly email contributions. He did not need dancing heart animated gifs and random pictures of cats, no sir!

He thoughtfully stroked his chin where he imagined an impressive Riker-like beard would sit whenever he retired and decided to let himself go. Maybe this amendment was the key to his Amy problems! If Amy could direct all her sexual urges toward Penny while remaining as his girlfriend, he'd get to keep his minion without having to deal with the constant headaches!

Sure, _Amy_ couldn't solve the problem of Penny's heterosexual attraction and behavior, but her brain-while impressive compared to a Muggle's-was nothing compared to his superior noggin. He just had to take her work and improve upon it to perfection. (This might require acknowledging Amy's hypothesis as conceptually sound, but he wasn't going to focus on such trivialities.)

It only took him thirty minutes to hack into Amy's personal computer. From there, it was simple to read up on all her efforts to reform SOCE using Penny as the main subject, despite Amy's poor organizational techniques. Didn't that girl know that a disorganized desktop led to a disorganized mind? He generously took an hour to whip her file structure into shape, leaving helpful organizational tips in a prominently displayed .txt file on her desktop. What would she do without him?

Remembering Penny, he returned to examining Amy's work. It was interesting; Amy managed a modicum of success when Penny was in a state of intoxication. Amy's conclusions about Penny having some homosexual interests repressed by years of growing up in a conservative environment that treated homosexuality as taboo did seem remarkably plausible. It was Amy's attempts to bring out this homosexual inclination in the state of sobriety that suffered horribly. Amy concluded that it was impossible for her to bring out whatever homosexuality lurked beneath the surface.

Sheldon shook his head. Amy, Amy, Amy... She committed the same conceptual error as the religiously-motivated SOCE. She thought of human sexuality as existing within far too small a model. Without the proper framework, it was impossible to adequately address the problem at hand. The incidence of Penny expressing appreciation for Amy's attempts at seduction while in a state of intoxication was not merely pulling away societally-induced sexual repression to reveal something underneath; it was actually one _vertex_ of a larger shape. What Amy-and, now, Sheldon-needed to do was discover a second vertex of her homosexual attraction, from which a line could be formed. More to the point, it would allow her homosexuality to be expressed more fully.

It was like in 1803, when the English scientist Thomas Young set out to prove light displayed the properties of a wave. He shone a beam of light upon a screen, on which he cut two slits some distance apart. If light displayed only the properties of a particle-as was wildly believed due to the experiments of Isaac Newton-then it could be expected that the light traveling through the slits would cast only two narrow shafts of light on the surface behind the screen. Young, however, showed that the light behaved in the manner of a wave. The separate parts of light traveling through the slits interacted with each other with the same interference expected by water or sound, and they produced a broad shine cast upon the whole of the surface behind the screen.

Amy cut a single slit in Penny's repression, and she received the small modicum of homosexuality that shone through. What she needed to have done was cut another slit to allow her homosexuality to truly emerge. Sheldon was certain he could succeed where his girlfriend failed and cut the secondary slit. Then Amy would divert her sexual expression away from him!

And so, Sheldon set out to perform his own version of the double-slit experiment. Weeks later, Amy would ask him if the double entendre were intentional. Sheldon would blink and wonder, "What double entendre?"


End file.
